Given that Wikipedia, Wikidata, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) all share the goal of making information free, open, and accessible, there seems to be a lot of potential for useful collaboration. Below I sketch out some ideas. BHL as a source of references for Wikipedia Wikipedia likes to have sources cited to support claims in its articles. BHL has a lot of articles that could be cited by Wikipedia articles.
As part of BHL's "Celebrating 10 years of inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge" at the NHM and Kew Gardens in London, I was interviewed by Martin Kalfatovic (@UDCMRK). We chatted about BHL, the work I've been doing on BioStor, and the future of BHL.
On Friday I discovered that BHL has started issuing CrossRef DOIs for articles, starting with the journal Revue Suisse de Zoologie . The metadata for these articles comes from BioStor. After a WTF and WWIC moment, I tweeted about this, and something of a Twitter storm (and email storm) ensued: To be clear, I'm very happy that BHL is finally assigning article-level DOIs, and that it is doing this via CrossRef.
Over the weekend, out of the blue, Dan Whaley commented on an earlier blog post of mine (Altmetrics, Disqus, GBIF, JSTOR, and annotating biodiversity data. Dan is the project lead for hypothes.is, a tool to annotate web pages.
One of the limitations of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is that, unlike say Google Books, its search functions are limited to searching metadata (e.g., book and article titles) and taxonomic names. It doesn't support full-text search, by which I mean you can't just type in the name of a locality, specimen code, or a phrase and expect to get back much in the way of results.
These are some quick thoughts on the games on the BHL site, part of the Purposeful Gaming and BHL Project. As mentioned on Twitter, I had a quick play of the Beanstalk game and got bored pretty quickly.
One of my guilty pleasures on a Sunday morning is browsing new content on the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). Indeed, so addicted am I to this that I have an IFTTT.com feed set to forward the BHL RSS feed to my iPhone (via the Pushover app. So, when I wake most Sunday mornings I have a red badge on Pushover announcing fresh BHL content for me to browse, and potentially add to BioStor.
One reason I'm excited by the launch of the NHM data portal is that it opens up opportunities to link publications about specimens i the NHM to the record of the specimens themselves.
The recent jump from ~11000 to ~17000 articles in JournalMap is mostly due to JournalMap ingesting content from my BioStor database.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has recently introduced a feature that I strongly dislike. The post describing this feature (Inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge... states: What this means is that, whereas in the past a search in BHL would only turn up content actually in BHL, now that search may return results from other sources. What's not to like?